Sacred Poetry from Around the World

Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses...and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.-Exodus 12: 7 & 13

They thought they were safethat spring night; when they daubedthe doorways with sacrificial blood.To be sure, the angel of deathpassed them over, but for what?Forty years in the desertwithout a home, without a bed,following new laws to an unknown land.Easier to have died in Egyptor stayed there a slave, pretendingthere was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those firstnaked days outside the garden,is that there is no safety,only the terrible blessingof the journey. You were bornthrough a doorway marked in blood.We are, all of us, passed over,brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,whose imagination you hold.God did not promise that we shall live,but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,brilliant in the desert sky.